by Antonio Prete
Bollati Boringhieri, 131 pp., € 16.00

JULIANNE VAN WAGENEN

Antonio Prete, professor of comparative literature at the University of Siena, begins his book: “To translate is to transmute one language into another language. One text into another text. One voice into another voice.”There is, in this alchemy, something that resembles the experience of love, or at least that same tension.” This motif of tension and love continues throughout the book. A great translation has to exist in the space between the language of origin and the ‘guest’ language...

“Prometto di non scrivere nessuna storia letteraria, nessun capitolo di storia letteraria, prima di avere letto per intero tutte le opere prese in considerazione e di ignorare tutte le precedenti storie letterarie a meno di essere certo che chi le ha scritte ha letto veramente tutte le opere che ha preso in considerazione”. Con queste parole Remo Ceserani concludeva un suo...

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Form or content? Both

I was reading Digital_Humanities on a Saturday evening just as my roommates and a group of friends were preparing to go out. As they put on their boots and scarves in the front hall, one member of the group commented on the book, specifically on page spreads 72-73 and 74-75: “Wow! That’s cool! What are you reading?” The poignancy of the moment was not lost on me....

PETER LIEBERMAN

ELENA CAMPANI 

by Douglas Biow
Stanford University Press, 246 pp., $19.95

DAN TURELLO

The ideals of grace and ease were ones that came to find great success and cultural currency during the Renaissance, in great measure thanks to the writing of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in which he describes the virtues of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the efforts behind one’s striving, so as to make it appear facile. The Galateo, by Giovanni della Casa, with its notion of proper manners and correct conduct specific to all occasions, is also a product of this time....

by Letizia Modena
Routledge, 267 pp., $146.00 ($99.75 ebook)

DAN TURELLO 

“If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell you how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks.” It is one of Marco Polo’s accounts to the Kublai Khan, from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The Kublai Khan, wrote Calvino in the introduction, was viewing an empire that was “an endless, formless ruin,” in which “corruption’s...

by Amedeo Quondam
Donzelli, 347 pp., € 28.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

“Would you care to bestow the grace of your dancing upon the gathered company?” asks the perfect courtier to his advisee. “Why, most absolutely not, my dear friend,” a slightly less than gracious Prince of Salina responds: “I’m afraid the mere sight of all this decadence has left me truly tired and emptied of energy.” “We shall therefore await the opportune moment,” is the courtier’s reply. “Certainly,” concedes the prince: “Though, I do eagerly anticipate your next words on sprezzatura. That...

by Antonella Russo
Einaudi, 428 pp., ill., € 35.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

Though the mere reference to the term “cultural history” is sometimes enough to push even the most tolerant of history buffs toward an apoplectic anxiety, fear not Antonella Russo’s ever so meticulously curated history of photography. For a bricolage of findings on post-World War II Italian photography or an ode to methodological eclecticism this book is most certainly not. Cultural insofar as the rich and nuanced picture of Italian photography that is achieved by Russo is...

by John Varriano
University of California Press, 282 pp., $19.50

PETER LIEBERMAN

In 1505 the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, at a banquet held by the artistic and gastronomic confraternity known as ‘the Company of the Cauldron,’ presented a scale model of the Florence Baptistery to his fellow diners. Architectural models were becoming common at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but what made del Sarto’s achievement so spectacular was that his miniature Baptistery was entirely edible—made from cheese, marzipan, sausage, and various fowl...

“Somewhere on the frontier, the ghost of Dostoevsky meets the ghost of Mickey Mouse. Like the characters from The Possessed, they exchange wry smiles.” Thus concludes the first chapter of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, uniting in a hypothetical world two seemingly disparate figures, and yet both represent nations —the United States and Russia —built on modern foundations of transcending history and memory. As a professor of...

a cura di Jeffrey T. Schnapp e Giuseppe Ferrandi
Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino

ELOISA MORA – Le Gallerie della memoria 

“Come siamo capitati in questo tunnel, proprio non lo so... ma la invito a riflettere: ci muoviamo su rotaie, il tunnel deve dunque portare da qualche parte. Nulla dimostra che nel tunnel vi sia qualcosa di fuori posto, tranne il fatto che non finisce mai”: così Friederich Dürrenmatt dava voce all'incubo dello studente svizzero protagonista del suo racconto Il tunnel, cronaca della fatale deviazione ferroviaria del treno Berna-...

ELGIN KIRSTEN ECKERT